What’s with all these dates?

There are many different dates stored in Dynamics GP. This is typically a good thing, my philosophy is that it is always better to have more data than you need and not the other way around. However, it can get confusing rather quickly since a lot of the labels for the dates sound very similar. I will attempt to shed some light on the more common dates in a ‘generic’ way, so that it can be applied to just about any module in GP, although the primary modules I am looking at are: Payables, Receivables, Sales Order Processing (SOP), Bank Reconciliation, Purchase Order Processing (POP) and General Ledger. 

• Document Date or Date: the subledger date. For most companies this is the actual date on the invoice that they receive from a vendor or send to a customer. In the Bank Reconciliation module this date is called Transaction Date or TRX Date.
• Posting Date or GL Posting Date: the date the transaction will post to the General Ledger and thus the date that determines what period the transaction will show up on your financial statements. This becomes the Transaction Date in the General Ledger.
• General Ledger Transaction Date: the date that determines what period the transaction will show up on your financial statements. This is the same as the Posting Date or GL Posting Date that is found in the subledgers.
• Posted Date: the date the transaction was actually posted. This will be the system date, not the ‘GP User Date’ at the time of the posting.
• Apply Date: the subledger apply date. Will be used when running aging reports using the Document Date, will be the subledger date for any transactions created during the apply process and will be used for the Date Invoice Paid Off (see below).
• Apply Posting Date: the General Ledger apply date. Will be used when running aging reports using the GL Posting Date, will be the General Ledger Transaction Date for any transactions created during the apply process.
• Date Invoice Paid Off: the date an invoice was fully applied (using the Apply Date).